Sapphire Radeon 9600XT Review - Benchmarks - AA/AF

For those who have been looking for performance on a budget, the recent release of the Radeon 9600XT was a true blessing. Today we look at the Sapphire version of this very VPU. Come join us as we see see if the lower cost still leaves you with enough performance to satisfy the gamer in all of us!

Since the early days of the Radeon 9500 boards, AA has been the special area of the ATI based products. Even the newer versions of the nVidia product line are just now getting to an acceptable level of performance in this area.

Simply put, Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are two methods of rendering the graphical output in a manner that gives a more realistic rendering of visual output. It gets rid of jagged lines and makes the overall appearance look like what you would see in a CG movie scene. The only problem with this is the performance hit you get when creating this improved visual scene.

So, knowing we'll be taking a performance hit, the goal is to be able to use these rendering techniques but still maintain a playable gaming scene without having a terrible frame rate.

So what better way to test this than to use the very same tests we used previously but with 4x AA and 16x AF? Here are the results: